More from Turmoil at OpenAI: what’s next for the creator of ChatGPT?
The company is on track to make about $3.4 billion in revenue this year, which is about double what it brought in last year, according to a new report by The Information.
CEO Sam Altman reportedly told employees that $200 million of that revenue is the cut OpenAI gets from Microsoft selling its models through Azure. That means the vast majority of OpenAI’s revenue is coming from ChatGPT subscriptions and its own developer platform.
[The Information]
Kevin Weil, a Facebook product veteran, is joining in the newly-created role of chief product officer. Ex-Nextdoor CEO Sarah Friar is also joining as chief financial officer.
“Sarah and Kevin bring a depth of experience that will enable OpenAI to scale our operations, set a strategy for the next phase of growth, and ensure that our teams have the resources they need to continue to thrive,” CEO Sam Altman says.
Vox reported yesterday, following two high-profile departures, that OpenAI’s exit terms include revoking employees’ vested equity in the company if they ever disparage it or acknowledge the terms exist. OpenAI told the outlet it hadn’t revoked equity before, and wouldn’t in the future.
Those terms were real and “should never have been,” Altman posted today, adding that he’s “genuinely embarrassed” by them.
The company’s legal response to Musk’s lawsuit was just made public and, as we expected, OpenAI refutes the crux of Musk’s argument: that it violated a founding contract with him when it became a commercial entity.
From OpenAI’s court filing, which is really just an official version of its public response to Musk last week:
Were this case to proceed to discovery, the evidence would show that Musk supported a for-profit structure for OpenAI, to be controlled by Musk himself, and dropped the project when his wishes were not followed. Seeing the remarkable technological advances OpenAI has achieved, Musk now wants that success for himself.
For context, here’s how the Wall Street Journal describes OpenAI’s once-again leader’s trillion dollar effort to “reshape the global semiconductor industry:”
Such a sum of investment would dwarf the current size of the global semiconductor industry. Global sales of chips were $527 billion last year and are expected to rise to $1 trillion annually by 2030.
The money is needed to fuel AI’s growth and solve the scarcity of expensive AI chips required to train the large language models that underpin systems like ChatGPT. According to the WSJ, Altman is pitching a chip-making partnership to investors from the UAE, SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son (again), and TSMC.
Remember the November upheaval at OpenAI, with Sam Altman fired and rehired as CEO? After all that, new board chair Bret Taylor said the ChatGPT company would “build a qualified, diverse Board of exceptional individuals” that included a nonvoting observer from Microsoft, which is OpenAI’s biggest financial backer.
Now Bloomberg reports that person is Microsoft vp Dee Templeton, who has been there for 25 years and leads a team responsible for managing its relationship with OpenAI.
OpenAI’s nonprofit parent company — the one with the board that suddenly fired Sam Altman last month — has its finances made public each year by the government. The numbers for 2022 were recently published by the IRS, and you can view the filing below.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t say much, given that it excludes the financials for OpenAI’s commercial entity that makes ChatGPT. What the filing does show is that Altman was paid $73,546 in 2022. Co-founders Greg Brockman and Ilya Sutskever were paid $113,727 and $334,572, respectively. What about the three board members who voted to fire Altman alongside Sutskever? They were paid nothing.
The New York Times published a look at OpenAI’s firing and rehiring of CEO Sam Altman. The moment-by-moment rundown doesn’t dig into the claims of Altman being “psychologically abusive” from yesterday’s Washington Post story.
Remember, this all started less than a month ago.
A new report from The Washington Post says that senior OpenAI staffers had indicated to the board Altman had been “psychologically abusive.” The board had also worried that it couldn’t keep Altman accountable.
All of that contributed to Altman’s firing, the report says — though, as we now know, Altman ultimately came out on top.
[The Washington Post]
Helen Toner, one of the board members who fired Sam Altman and then ousted herself when Altman returned, has given an interview to The Wall Street Journal. She is unable to give a specific reason for Altman’s firing beyond “Our goal in firing Sam was to strengthen OpenAI and make it more able to achieve its mission.”
Listen, babe, I am fully happy to hear you out, but if being full of shit is a firing offense for CEOs, everyone in the Fortune 500 would be looking for a new job.
“I totally get why people want an answer right now. But I also think it’s totally unreasonable to expect it.”